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anymore.
    All those ­people watching me.
    There was the sound, which I was expecting but it still made me jump. I’m sure you’ve heard a shotgun fired before.
    One by one, the ­people in the hallway nodded to themselves. Bit their lips and nodded, because they knew the right thing had been done. And then they went back inside, closing their doors behind them, leaving me there in the dark of the corridor.
    I don’t remember if I cried.

 
    CHAPTER 6
    I guess it was Brian who led me downstairs and sent me to the hospital. It was funny, you got used to the first generation never doing much of anything, wasting all the time they had left. But when somebody zombied out, they moved like lightning. They took Ike and me down in the ambulance, the first time either of us had ever ridden in a car. We were fine, and I couldn’t figure out why they were making such a fuss. The ambulance had to go slow, crawling over debris and potholes for the three-­block ride. The siren ran the whole time, which made it impossible for us to talk.
    Ike was covered in blood. My mom’s blood. It had ruined his clothes, smeared on his face. He looked calm and okay. I don’t know what I looked like.
    The hospital was just another building, a five-­story building with a shop front that still had its plate glass. Inside you could see ­people lying on beds, staring at one another, at the walls. Most of the ­people in the front room were first generation. Vegetable types, the kind who just never recovered after the crisis. Sometimes they can work; if you put a hoe or a trowel in their hands, they’ll garden away all day until you tell them to stop. Sometimes they just lie down in their beds and don’t get up again.
    Nobody looked at us as we were hurried through, into back rooms. The ­people in charge of us—­I don’t remember who they were—­split us up pretty fast. I didn’t have a chance to say anything to Ike. What would I have said? Thank you? I hate you because you killed my mom? I understand you did what you had to do, so thank you, but I still hate you? I didn’t even look at him.
    The room they put me in was empty except for two chairs. It was probably a closet of some kind originally—­it wasn’t big. The walls were painted a pristine white. Everything in the hospital is clean. An electric light was burning in the ceiling, even in the middle of the day, which felt wrong to me. There were no windows, so without the light it would have been pitch-­black in there.
    My dad came by a while later. He looked into the room where I was waiting and smiled at me, but it was the worst smile I’d ever seen. Totally fake, and we both knew it, and still there was nothing to say. Someone came and took his arm and led him away, and I continued to wait.
    Eventually a doctor came and sat in the chair across from me.
    I knew why he was there.
    â€œI wasn’t bitten,” I told him. I held out my arms and my hands. He glanced at them, but like he was just being polite. “She foamed up a lot, but I didn’t get any of the saliva on me. I did touch her once, but just with my shoe.”
    He nodded and looked at a piece of paper he was holding.
    â€œI know how to be careful,” I told him. He hadn’t said a word. “I’ve heard it all, on the radio, from my—­my parents. From everybody. I know how it spreads. You can’t get it from casual contact. You have to exchange body fluids. This was my mom we’re talking about. That would be gross.”
    He nodded in agreement but still said nothing.
    â€œWhat else?” I said. I was talking to myself. “Blood transfusions, but we never had to do that. She kissed me plenty of times, but only on the head or on the cheek. There was a lot of—­of blood at the end there, she cut herself on a knife, but I didn’t touch it. I never touched the blood. And I wasn’t there when